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Retail RFID Solutions

Retail interest in RFID technology is driven by the desire of companies to achieve greater speed and visibility into their supply chains, with the goal of increasing both operational efficiency and store effectiveness. An efficient supply chain operation ensures that goods can be delivered to the place and time when consumers are ready to purchase. Potential gains from the visibility RFID systems generate include lower inventory levels, reduced labor costs and increased sales, among others as shown below.

Figure 1: Creating more profitable stores is easily facilitated by RFID technology. The combination of focused business objectives and measurements plus RFID technology provides a powerful formula for achieving increased shareholder value.

Several retailers and CPG companies have deployed successful pilots of EPC-RFID. Targeted timeframes were announced by several companies to expand the implementations. The number and scope of these efforts will grow as companies seek the exact business and process models that will maximize their ROI for EPC implementation. The following list summarizes several of the benefits that retailers will capture with RFID-based solutions. These benefits can be grouped into issues of speed and visibility:

Benefits of Speed:

• Eliminate lost sales due to out of stocks
• Speed up store receiving, processing, replenishment plus point of sale (POS) and returns processing
• Notification of units needed on sales floor upon store receipt
• Satisfy customer requests immediately by locating products on sales floor and in the backroom
• Fast, accurate inventory audits
• Increased distribution center efficiency and accuracy

Benefits of Visibility:

• Unit, carton and pallet-level visibility throughout supply chain
• Immediate identification of exceptions at check points
• Visibility to replenish the right product to the right place at the right time
• Block defective merchandise and counterfeit merchandise

In the near term, the emphasis for RFIDsystems is on applications, which involve "the supply chain to the store backroom" - tagging pallets, cartons and reusable containers to track the movement of goods throughout the distribution system.